Fortunately, one regional EPA officer was very cooperative and agreed to produce a national Superfund diskette for the NLJ reporter at no charge. It's no surprise that wealth and race have long separated neighborhoods and communities nestled in the American landscape. It is surprising, however, that the U.S. government has allowed waste and pollution to fester in minority communities, becoming a deadly element of that injustice.
Children suffer birth defects. Mothers and fathers battle cancer. Brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles complain of pink eye and asthma, ringworm and respiratory problems. This is life in one of the many minority neighborhoods that are not receiving equal protection under environmental law. The Environmental Protection Agency has promoted a racial divide in the United States by acting faster to clean up toxic waste sites in white communities and punishing polluters in white neighborhoods more severely.
These are some of the startling discoveries The National Law Journal made when reporters Marianne Lavelle, Marcia Coyle and Claudia MaClachlan embarked on an eight-month project combining computer-assisted analysis of thousands of incidents with in-depth portraits of families who live each day in these minority communities that have become hazardous pollution dumping grounds. The article 'Unequal Protection: The Racial Divide in Environmental Law' not only unveiled the bias of environmental law in the U.S.
government, but also earned the NLJ an IRE Award for its accomplishments. It was not easy. The road to obtaining documentation on diskette from the government was paved with denials, rejections, and non-cooperation. 'We knew that there was so much data that we would need to do the project by computer,' Lavelle said. The reporters' first difficulty was obtaining computer data on Superfund locations.
Superfund is a complex federal program for identifying and cleaning up the worst of the nation's hazardous waste sites. The original diskette the NLJ received from the EPA for $200 was inadequate and incomplete. The data did not include when cleanup occurred and what happened after the identification of a Superfund site. At first, the EPA denied that such data even existed. But eventually officials conceded that the information could be obtained through each EPA regional office.
In all, 10 FOIA requests were filed with the 10 regional offices. 'They responded very slowly, and each field office had a different response, from outright refusal to wanting to charge us $500 for the information,' Lavelle said. Fortunately, one regional EPA officer was very cooperative and agreed to produce a national Superfund diskette for the NLJ reporter at no charge. 'It wasn't through FOIA requests but through reporting skills and a reasonable EPA officer that we were able to obtain the data we needed,' Lavelle explained.
Reporting skills helped to open still another door when the NLJ reporters attempted to obtain data from the Census Bureau. Because the bureau sells its data to individual contractors, retrieving the data can be very expensive, Lavelle explained. A contractor wanted to charge them $10,000 for the information. 'Luckily, through some reporting we were able to locate a non-profit organization, the Population Reference Bureau, whose purpose is to make census data public,' Lavelle said.
'They merged our EPA data with their census data and gave it to us on a computer disk we could use on our personal computers for $2,000.' After obtaining the various data, the reporters built two databases titled 'Enforgraph' and 'Supergraph,' linking demographic data with EPA's enforcement results and with EPA's Superfund progress, respectively. They collected and entered data on diskette using their Magnavox 386 SX-16 personal computer and the word-processing programs XYWrite and WordPerfect.
The reporters also corrected nearly 200 ZIP codes from EPA's records by calling corporate headquarters, post offices, city halls and EPA regional offices, as well as interviewing agency engineers to fill in the various gaps in the EPA's Superfund data. They continued to manipulate and massage the data on their personal computers. Then they conducted nearly 500 interviews for their report, including many minority families living in these highly polluted communities.
Overall, the project took eight months. Five months were spent gathering and analyzing the computer data and researching environmental injustice, two months were spent reporting in communities and one month was reserved for writing and editing the article. 'My advice to reporters wanting to get involved in computer-assisted reporting is to jump into a project,' Lavelle, who had never worked on a computer-assisted project before.
'In my opinion, you need to use computers to learn how to do it. Only by using your hands can you really learn.'